Pinos Altos sits on the eastern slope of the Pinos Altos Mountains, a short drive from Silver City, and it is easy to tell its story with more confidence than the evidence allows. The camp has collected a century and a half of retellings: dramatic battle scenes, lost mines, buildings said to be older than they are. This chapter takes a narrower path. Every fact below comes from a source that was checked line by line for the Grant County Atlas, and each one links to that source. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement stays in the story. Where they are silent, the story says so.
What is left is still a remarkable history: a gold strike in a homeland that was already occupied, a camp attacked within a year of its founding, a war that nearly emptied it, and a town that outlasted all of it.
A strike in someone else’s homeland
The U.S. Geological Survey dates the discovery of the Pinos Altos placers to 1860 (Johnson, Placer Gold Deposits of New Mexico, USGS Bulletin 1348, p. 9), and the National Register nomination for the Pinos Altos Historic District gives the same year for the gold discovery the community grew from (Pinos Altos Historic District nomination). Placer gold is the loose gold of streambeds and gulches, the kind a newcomer could work with a pan and water. Lode gold, locked in veins of rock, took more capital and more patience. Pinos Altos would have both, and one man’s name is attached to the first lode: Thomas Mastin is credited with locating the first quartz lode, the vein later worked as the Pacific mine (Hall, “Captain Thomas J. Mastin’s Arizona Guards, C.S.A.,” New Mexico Historical Review, p. 144).
The miners did not arrive in empty country. The historian Hana Norton writes that Mangas Coloradas regarded the area of the strike as his homeland (Norton, “Apaches and the mining menace,” NMGS Guidebook 49, p. 57). Within months the two worlds collided. Norton records that on December 4, 1860, miners attacked a Mimbres Apache camp and killed Elías, a leader she describes as friendly to whites (Norton, p. 57). The killing of a man known for his good relations with the newcomers is the first dated violence in the checked record of Pinos Altos, and it came from the mining side. The Mimbres River chapter of our Apache history series follows that event in more detail.
A camp with a name
By the summer of 1861 the camp had a name that officials used. When Lt. Col. John Baylor organized his Confederate territorial government in August, the appointments included a justice of the peace for Pinos Altos, so the name was in official use by August 2, 1861 (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 4, Ch. XI, p. 22). It is a small detail with a large meaning: a place that has a justice of the peace has people, disputes, property and some expectation of order.
The Civil War had reached the far Southwest by then, and it shaped who would defend the camp. Thomas J. Mastin, the man credited with the first lode, appears under that name in 1861 records, including a letter of September 27, 1861 that calls him “Col. Thomas J. Mastin” (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 50, Pt. 1, p. 639). He was captain of a company called the Arizona Guards, raised on the Confederate side, and the records of the time spell his name Mastin.
September 27, 1861
Martin Hall’s study of the Arizona Guards, built on the company’s muster records and contemporary newspapers, dates the attack on the camp to September 27, 1861 (Hall, p. 145). How many came against it is harder to say. A newspaper report that Hall cites put the attackers at 250 to 300 (Hall, p. 145, n. 21). That figure comes from the Mesilla Times, a local paper, six days after the fight, and it is the only number the checked sources give.
Who led them is disputed. Fayette Jones, writing in 1904, named Mangas Coloradas and Cochise as the leaders of the attack (Jones, New Mexico Mines and Minerals, p. 48). Jones wrote more than forty years after the event, and later accounts differ on who commanded. The wider story of the two leaders is told in our chapter on Mangas Coloradas, Cochise and the 1860s war. Whether both stood at Pinos Altos that morning is a question the checked record does not close.
The defenders are better documented. Mastin had a detachment of 15 Arizona Guards at the camp during the attack (Hall, p. 145). According to Hall’s roster, Mastin was badly wounded in the arm, with the main artery damaged, and he died of the wound on October 7, 1861, ten days after the fight (Hall, pp. 145-146). J. B. Corwin of the Arizona Guards was killed in the fight itself (Hall, p. 148). Some accounts give a different day for the battle or count Mastin among those killed outright; our chapter on the 1861 battle sets those versions side by side.
One silence is worth noting. The War Department’s Official Records are the obvious place to look for an official report of the fight, and the chapters of reports and correspondence searched for this chapter hold none (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 4, Ch. XI, and Vol. 50, Pt. 1, Ch. LXII, as searched). The best account of the day comes from a company roster and newspapers, not from an army report.
The weeks after
A letter written at Pinos Altos on October 8, 1861 gives a rare view from inside the camp. About 70 miners remained, it says, only half of them armed, and many others had left the day before (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 4, p. 121). Eleven days after the attack, the camp was holding on with a fraction of its people.
Baylor answered with soldiers and with alarm. He sent Maj. E. Waller with 100 men, who left on October 10, and in a letter of October 14 he wrote that the most important and available mines were under the sway of Indians (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 4, p. 120). His wording is worth reading closely: he did not claim that every mine was lost, only the ones that mattered most.
Hunger, and the end of Mangas Coloradas
The war went on, and the Confederate hold on the region did not last. When Union officers reached Pinos Altos in August 1862, they found about 30 Americans and Europeans and about 30 poor Mexican families, and some of the people there were living on purslane and roots (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 50, Pt. 1, pp. 105-106). Purslane is a common weed that can be eaten as greens; a camp founded on gold had come down to foraging.
The man whose homeland the camp occupied did not survive the war. According to the Fort Sill Apache Tribe’s account of its ancestors, Mangas Coloradas was taken captive and killed in 1863 after coming to negotiate (Fort Sill Apache Tribe, “Our Ancestors”). Some retellings give a month as well; the tribal account checked here gives the year, and this chapter stops there.
The rock beneath the camp
The gold had a source, and the U.S. Geological Survey has described it twice. In 1911 Sidney Paige mapped the ore deposits near Pinos Altos: granodiorite intruding diorite porphyry, with fissure veins cutting both, limestone replacement bodies to the northwest and later lavas to the north (Paige, “The ore deposits near Pinos Altos,” USGS Bulletin 470, pp. 109-110). Six decades later Maureen Johnson traced the placer gold back to that rock: it came from the eroded, oxidized outcrops of sulfide-gold-silver veins (Johnson, p. 9).
That sequence explains the shape of the camp’s history. The first miners worked the loose gold that weather had freed from the veins and carried into the gulches. The longer future lay in the veins themselves, the lodes that began with Mastin’s claim. Our geology chapter sets Pinos Altos beside the county’s other districts.
What the ground gave up
How much gold came out of Pinos Altos depends on which table you read. The USGS gives the district’s production through 1959 as 104,975 ounces from lode mines and 42,647 ounces from placers (Johnson, table 2, p. 36). A second table in the same report counts the placer gold differently: 38,842 ounces from discovery to 1902, then 4,122 ounces in 1902-1933, 1,771 ounces in 1934-1942 and 102 ounces in 1943-1968 (Johnson, table 1, pp. 34-35).
The two placer counts cover different years and do not add up to the same total, which is common in old production records and a reason to quote them as estimates. Two things are clear from both. The lodes produced far more than the placers, and placer output fell to almost nothing in the twentieth century. Neither table says anything about gold left in the ground today, and neither is a guide to where to look. For the mines themselves, see the Pacific and Cleveland mines and our Pinos Altos gold and silver mining guide.
The town that stayed
Pinos Altos outlived the war, the hunger and the decline of its placers, and its buildings carry the later story. The National Register nomination lists the Gold Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, known as the Hearst Church, as built and dedicated in 1898, with major funding from Phoebe Hearst on condition that it include a reading room (Pinos Altos Historic District nomination, Sec. 7 p. 3 and Sec. 8 p. 5). A church with a library attached says something about the town at the end of the century: settled enough to build for the long term, with a benefactor who wanted it to read.
The same nomination corrects a common assumption. The Pinos Altos Opera House building dates from the 1960s, not the 1860s (nomination, Sec. 7 pp. 3 and 7). It is part of the town’s modern life, not its gold-rush past. The Buckhorn building is listed as a moderately remodeled contributing structure, and the nomination gives no date or owner for it (nomination, Sec. 7 p. 6). When a sign or a story gives the Buckhorn an exact founding year, this record does not back it up.
What the record has not settled
Several questions stay open, and they are worth keeping in view:
- Who led the 1861 attack. The earliest account found, Jones in 1904, names Mangas Coloradas and Cochise; later accounts differ.
- How many attacked. The only figure, 250 to 300, comes from a single newspaper report.
- The exact day. Hall’s date of September 27 is the one checked here; other accounts give another day.
- The people of the camp. Beyond Mastin, Corwin and Elías, the checked sources name few individuals, and the miners, merchants and families of early Pinos Altos are mostly unnamed so far.
- Treasure stories. None has passed source review. Pinos Altos has many, and they will be told only with a label for how strong their sources are.
Seeing it for yourself
The Pinos Altos: Then & Now map lays the 1909 USGS map of the area over today’s roads and names, so you can follow the old wagon roads into town and see how the modern highway runs beside them. The Atlas dossier lists every fact in this chapter with its source and page. Both are part of the Grant County Atlas research preview.
Pinos Altos is a living community. A mine, road or building named here is not permission to enter, collect, dig or detect: check land ownership and current rules with the land manager first. For a day in the area, our Pinos Altos and the Gila high road guide covers the area and the road beyond it.
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